Integrating the Emerging Concepts of Ecosystem Services into Oil and Gas Industry Environmental Management Practices

摘要

The Oil and Gas industry has long recognised the importance in assessing interactions of its activities with the natural environment and the need to integrate biodiversity issues into environmental management practices. This is key to ensuring business continuity, access to new resources and the sustainable shared use of nature. The joint work of the oil and gas trade associations, IPIECA and OGP, addresses biodiversity risk management and the increasingly-adopted concept of ecosystem services. This concept considers humans as an integral part of an ecosystem economy that both depends on, and potentially affects, natural capital through a supply and demand process. To achieve sustainable, shared use of natural resources, we must ensure that combined demand does not exceed nature’s ability to supply. Governments, organisations and the financial sector are embracing the concept, which enables more rigorous determination of environmental and business risk, but also highlights new revenue generation and cost saving opportunities. Oil and gas activities both depend upon and impact biodiversity and the services ecosystems provide (such as by using water and relying on natural waste assimilation). Therefore, there is a clear business case for companies to identify and manage dependencies and impacts effectively, as well as to consider the maintenance or enhancement of ecosystems providing valuable services. This paper overviews the recent IPIECA-OGP publication, Ecosystem Services Guidance, drawing on a hypothetical arctic case study. This guide was produced to help member companies apply the concept of ecosystem services as part of existing environmental assessment and management practices. The guide explains the relationships among biodiversity, ecosystem services and oil and gas activities; provides a set of checklists for identifying important ecosystem service dependencies and potential impacts through the asset life-cycle stages and key habitat types, onshore and offshore; and finally highlights some associated risks and opportunities, providing guidance on management measures.